My s20 has heard us chat about a big move for a long time, mainly because he, his sibs, and my husband are all Italian citizens and the idea has been to shed the big house here and get a place in Italy for us all to use a few months a year. He is the only one not into that, simply because he hates the long flight there. But he may shake that once he matures and appreciates travel more.
He’s a generous soul and would never stop us from doing what he thinks we want. “It’s fine” is his favorite sentence. He has told us not to consider him when we think of a move completely out of Cleveland because he seems to think he’ll end up someplace remote, like North Dakota. Who knows how that got in his head.
But he’s only 17, and has all of the lack of self-awareness most 17 year olds have. On top of that, he tends to suffer in silence and he could be miserable and would never tell us. My older two would send a daily voicemail on their misery. He would never say a word.
Thanks for the feedback; I welcome more. The timing kind of matters as it feeds decisions about what projects I take and when my husband begins his transition to semi-retirement. While I would love to get the house ready for the market all next summer, targeting a fall sale, I am leaning towards at least waiting until the spring of his first year to shake his timbers. I think his having his first summer ‘home’ would be a good idea.
What triggered this query was my asking him what to do with a pair of hockey gloves which have been sitting on my entrance table for six months. They have holes on the finger tips and are obviously unusable. I asked, expecting the answer to be ‘toss them.’ But he couldn’t part with them. I think he’s really feeling the reality of what his transition to college will be like. While his college search began with intent to go far away, his ultimate decision had a lot to do with staying close to home and going where he knows many kids. He has to live things before he realizes that he does have feelings and they matter. Even wannabe engineers need to feel at home.